CHAMARET WORKS IN book publishing in New York, and I feel fortunate to know her because she’s as crazy for Paris, and France, as I am. But it wasn’t always so: she was smitten with Italy and Spain (she spoke both Italian and Spanish) and had never studied French nor set foot in France. “I never had a care in the world to know anything about France,” she told me, “until the night I went to a bar with my best friend on West Fifty-first Street and I met a French man at the bar, and married him not long after.” Chamaret’s husband, Sébastien, is from a very small town in the département of Mayenne in the Loire Valley next to Normandy, where his family has lived on the same farm for four generations. When he first brought Chamaret there, she related, “It was one of the most foreign cultural experiences of my life. I’m very adaptable—I was born overseas, I’ve lived in a number of different places, and I’m pretty good at adapting to my surroundings—but I’ve never felt so much like a fish out of water. Me, a New York City girl in the middle of nowhere in France where things don’t get done the way they get done here, and Sébastien’s parents don’t speak a word of English. They were so welcoming, so inviting, and just incredibly lovely. Everything we ate was grown or made right there on the farm, from the pâté to the pears and everything in between. The house was simple and clean and it didn’t matter that it hadn’t been redecorated in many, many years—the chairs were the same ones they’d had for fifty years. It was a whole different kind of thing and couldn’t have been further from my life up to that point.”
Laura and Sébastien never had any intention of living in Paris, but on a trip around France to see where they did want to live, they ended up stranded in Paris on September 11, 2001. A good friend offered to stay at his girlfriend’s and gave them his apartment until they could get home, which wasn’t until a week later. “We fell in love with the city,” says Chamaret. “And I’m sure some of that love was due to the situation, our emotions, and how wonderful the Parisians were to us, but we knew we were staying for at least a few years.” And they did. (Though they eventually returned to New York to start a family, they plan to move back to France one day.)
Trips and sojourns in France over the intervening twelve years have led many friends and colleagues to seek the travel advice of the Chamarets. “You have no idea how many people ask my husband and me for advice on what to do when they’re going to France,” Chamaret told me. “I assume that they have read a guidebook or two, and I tell them what my three favorite museums are—the Musée d’Orsay, the Centre Georges Pompidou, and the Orangerie. A lot of people don’t know that at the Pompidou there’s a restaurant with a beautiful terrace on top that has one of the most lovely views of Paris you’ve ever seen—the food’s not great but it’s a great place to go for a drink after you’ve seen the fabulous collection.” But she adds, “No one realizes how much work goes into requests like these, because you have to consider what people hope to get out of their trip, you have to think of what things to recommend for first-time visitors versus those who’re visiting again, you have to know how familiar they are with the language and culture, and you have to create an itinerary—it’s time-consuming and it’s work, which is why the services of a good travel consultant are so valuable!”
LAURA CHAMARET, who is not a writer by profession, won first prize for this piece in a 2006 Food & Wine essay contest entitled Tell Us About Your Most Memorable Thanksgiving. She kindly edited her essay slightly for this book. Her husband, former chef de cuisine at Manhattan’s legendary La Goulue and pastry chef at Orsay, is co-owner, with Adrien Angelvy, of the new restaurant Le Comptoir (251 Grand Street / 718 486 3300 / lecomptoirny.com) in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn.
MY FATHER’S BIRTHDAY always fell near or on Thanksgiving. So while I was growing up, it was considered an important holiday for our family. It was a time that, no matter where my parents or siblings were on the globe, we would reunite at one table and break bread. It was an enjoyable time that gave me a fleeting notion of stability that I longed for.
At the end of my twenties, I still had a globe-trotting lifestyle and in 2002, I moved to Paris with Sébastien, my French boyfriend—now husband. He became a chef at an early age and was the executive chef at Perry Bistro (since closed) in New York City when we met in 1999. We moved to the City of Light so I could learn to speak French fluently. His parents were milk farmers in the countryside and didn’t speak a word of English. If this relationship was going to continue, it was high time I could have a conversation with them. When we made the leap, we didn’t have much money, so we found a one-bedroom apartment in a seventh-floor walk-up. We didn’t care because it had a terrace, and who needs an elevator when you have a terrace to dine on and a view of the rooftops of Paris? It was in the nineteenth arrondissement, in the northeast section of the city by the mystical Canal Saint-Martin.
We made fast friends with people Sébastien knew through the New York restaurant scene. Our friend’s brother Louis didn’t live far from our quartier, and his girlfriend, Virginie, became my best friend. Our network grew and when autumn came I missed the simple yet crucial event of carving a turkey with family—and with my father now gone, my childhood tradition had become a memory. But these people over time had become my family—a strong support so far from home. When I told Virginie how much I longed for Thanksgiving, she was fascinated, and she wanted to know what this holiday was all about. Many Parisians had heard of it and wondered about it, she told me. We should plan our “French Thanksgiving,” she said, and as she’s gregarious, she told all our friends. What began as a dinner for eight turned into a banquet for twenty-eight like wildfire. Some of our friends weren’t French but were, like me, expatriates from other parts of the world who were attracted to Paris and all it had to offer. They, too, had wondered about this Thanksgiving phenomenon.
A week before Thanksgiving, Sébastien informed me we needed to order the turkey from the butcher now. I thought this was absurd. Surely if people were this curious about our holiday, turkeys would be everywhere in anticipation of a stray American in their neighborhood—ethnocentric thinking indeed. As instructed, I went to our butcher—a kind, large, jolly man who we came to know well during our time living on avenue Secrétan. I asked him for a ten- or twelve-kilo dinde and he laughed in my face. Surely I was joking. That would be nearly impossible to find in time for my dinner next week. It’s simply not the time for turkeys, he informed me. Could he get me a goose instead? Then he stopped and remembered vaguely about that American tradition of killing turkeys in the middle of November, and could I explain why we do this? At every turn, I found myself recounting a quick version of American history and how Thanksgiving has transformed into a time for food and family more than anything else. He was happy to go above and beyond and get my dinde. It would be here by Tuesday.
Two days before Thanksgiving, our friends were over for apéritifs and we looked around our 650-square-foot apartment trying to figure out exactly how we were going to fit twenty-eight people for dinner—and at one table, no less. The one table we had could seat six at most. They called themselves into action immediately, determined to make the dinner a success. Louis would bring two extra tables from his parents’ house and folding chairs. We would move the armoire and couch out of the living room and line the table up diagonally through the center of the room to fit everyone together. Lionel would bring at least twenty plates; Virginie would ask Alona and Thérèse to bring extra silverware. We would go out tomorrow morning together to buy cheap wine glasses from the catchall five-and-dime shop down the street. We were all quite thankful that the liquor store was only across the street!
The hard part was getting all the food. The French apartment lifestyle has yet to incorporate a Sub-Zero. Our apartment didn’t come with an oven, either. We only had a large tabletop rotisserie oven in which to make turkey, popovers, and stuffing in. The timing had to be perfect. We had a tiny two-shelf fridge under our counter. Everything that needed to be refrigerated would have to be bought Thursday morning. Thankfully it was a chilly November, because the turkey would have to live on the terrace in the small shed for a while to keep cold. Wednesday was spent prepping vegetables, as well as making pain surprise for the apéritifs and, of course, the pies—two pumpkin and two of grandma’s apple pies.
You might be asking yourself what a pain surprise is. Quite simply, hollow out the bread, make a mix of sandwich flavors, and put them back in! I made salted cucumber with chive crème fraîche, jambon de Serrano with olive tapenade, brandade de morue (a spreadable codfish concoction that is quite delicious), and mousse of duck foie gras with sea salt and fig jam. It’s a surprise because you don’t know what sandwich you will get—a terrible plan for an American party of picky eaters, but the French don’t seem to have that in their blood.
PAIN SURPRISE
Cut off the top of a large round bread loaf, or boule. For this dish, pain de mie is the best bread option.
Cut a circle inside the crust sides and very strategically cut out the bottom to lift out the bread.
Slice those into sandwich-size pieces and make various flavors of small tea sandwiches.
As I prepped away, various people climbed up and down seven flights of stairs with supplies or stuffed our bedroom with the living room furniture to make extra room. They were literally working for their meal. It was grand. Everyone was having a fantastic time and making Thanksgiving possible. It had become a quest.
The morning of Thanksgiving, our fridge decided not to cooperate and the door fell off. I called Sébastien at the restaurant where he worked not knowing what to do, and he assured me that everything would be fine. He got the evening off and would fix it when he returned home. In the meantime, he told me, “Improvise.” Hadn’t I been doing that all along? Well, when you are already dealing with the size of a fridge I had, the challenge was keeping everything cold. To make matters worse, when I took the turkey out of the little porch shed, I knew it wouldn’t be enough meat for the size of our group, so I ran to the butcher and got three turkey roulades—basically, breasts rolled and tied by the butcher. I was panicked because I had no idea how I would fit them into the fridge or the cooking schedule. Things were packed in the fridge as it was (crème fraîche, butter, cheese, herbs, leeks, sausage … to name a few), so my biggest obstacles were keeping everything from spilling out and finding a good place to put the door while I awaited technical assistance!
Timing the cooking order to make this whole thing possible was a multitasking achievement. The morning of our big event, the turkey was the first thing to go in, at about eight-thirty a.m. It would take at least six to seven hours on the highest setting, better known as number 8 on French ovens, to cook. It’s an everyday challenge figuring out the conversion temperatures when you have the American ones in your head. This time, eight was easy! The sausage and chestnut stuffing was the next to cook, taking about an hour and a half to two hours. The potatoes and haricots verts were done on the stove top, lightening up the oven schedule considerably. You may be asking yourself how so many hours were possible before a Thanksgiving meal but it is not a holiday in France, so we weren’t going to sit down much before seven o’clock in the evening. The tough part was toward the late afternoon. You have to make the popovers last (they deflate, and who wants to eat a cold popover?) and I had three turkey roulades to roast. What I ended up doing was roasting them once everyone had arrived. They baked through the cocktail hour(s) and the beginning of dinner. They were meant to serve as seconds to everyone, so the timing was great. Sure enough, everything worked out. I managed to have centerpieces, flowers, candles, and enough wine to make it complete.
When all was said and done, we sat down with twenty-three of our friends and shared our first real Thanksgiving overseas. Although it’s an American tradition, I tried to incorporate tastes of my new homeland. We feasted on herbs de Provence turkey, sausage and chestnut stuffing, leek and crème fraîche mashed potatoes, haricots verts amandine, and Roquefort popovers. In turn, they were served with true Americana authenticities like cranberry sauce and grandma’s apple pie. Unlike our other typical meals in France, we stuffed ourselves, as is the custom after all. I told stories about the origins of Thanksgiving and realized in the middle of all this that the people at my table represented a multitude of places: France, England, Russia, Sweden, Norway, South Korea, and others. They had gathered together and made the effort to make it special. These were my overseas brothers and sisters. I experienced not only a wonderful Thanksgiving Day so many miles from home in Paris, but the feeling of home and stability that I’d missed.
Salons de Thé
As popular as coffee is in Paris, tea has become very au courant over the last twenty years or so, and there are many more salons de thé than there once were. As Sebastian Beckwith, a cofounder of my favorite tea company, In Pursuit of Tea (inpursuitoftea.com), mentioned to me, “Paris is a city that respects tea. Compared to England, where tea is really comfort food, France elevates tea to a higher level—the French are masters at scenting and flavoring tea, adding flavors and oils and herbs to make their blends. And I like that salons de thé offer a meeting place for Parisians as well as travelers.”
Among the most venerable salons is Mariage Frères, notably its outpost at 30 rue du Bourg-Tibourg in the Marais (+33 01 42 72 28 11 / mariagefreres.com). There are other Mariage Frères outposts and tea counters in Paris—as well as in other French cities, in Germany, and in Japan—but none of them, in my opinion, are as grand and Old World as this one. It’s quite an impressive space, and you really feel like you’ve stepped into another world, which in fact you have. As Alain Stella describes it in Mariage Frères French Tea: Three Centuries of Savoir-Faire (Flammarion, 2003): “Open the door of the Mariage Frères tea house, and a mysterious fragrance slyly declares itself. This fragrance comes forward first to greet you, then embrace you.… You might be tempted to say, like everyone else who vainly attempts to describe it, that it’s the scent of paradise. To a certain extent, this fragrance incarnates the spirit of Mariage Frères. The French tea merchant launches you on a sensual voyage to a dreamlike place, unique in the world, full of endless delights. Mariage Frères invites you to discover its wealth of five hundred teas, each of which, on being served, yields up a few molecules of scent certain to surprise and charm you.”
Founded as a tea and vanilla import firm in 1854, Mariage Frères remained a family business until 1982, when it was sold to Richard Bueno and Kitti Cha Sangmanee. Marthe Cottin, the only family member who was still with the company at the time, shared her knowledge of the tea trade (which was considerable) with Bueno and Sangmanee, as well as her “priceless asset—an extraordinary address book rich with one hundred years of suppliers as well as clients.” Franck Desains, who created the company’s distinctive black and pale yellow packaging, joined the company in 1987, and he continues guiding the company with Sangmanee (Bueno passed away in 1995). (The family name Mariage has nothing to do with marriage or nuptials: the word comes from the old French verb maréier, “to run the seas.” In a nautical context, a maréage referred to a sailor’s contract for the run, a set wage for a voyage no matter how long it lasted. Before 1650 the family name was spelled in several different ways, but after 1650 Mariage was adopted as its official spelling.)
At the time Bueno and Sangmanee came to Mariage Frères, tea was barely noticed in France. But even when Sangmanee visited England to learn more about tea, he discovered that tea there was mostly sold in tea bags found in supermarkets. At fancy hotels that offered proper afternoon tea service the selection of teas was limited to five or six varieties, and Sangmanee realized that the quality and variety of tea he and Bueno were offering was far greater than that commonly found in England. Tea was woven into the fabric of British life but it was not considered a fine, high-quality product. Sangmanee realized then that the future of Mariage Frères lay in a “gourmet” direction: offering a large range of teas and seeking out the very best leaves and harvests in the world.
If Mariage Frères has since become somewhat ubiquitous (you can buy Mariage Frères tea at a number of stores in New York alone, for example), its rue du Bourg-Tibourg shop remains distinctive, not only for its interior but for its Musée du Thé, upstairs, which is filled with exquisite objets. Fans both of tea in general and of Mariage Frères in particular will want to immediately obtain a copy of the book noted above—it’s a gorgeously produced volume in its own slipcase, and its author Alain Stella, is “an enthusiastic connoisseur of the everyday pleasures that define cultures and civilizations.” (Don’t you just love that?)
Cafés
“Cafés are central to Parisian life,” writes Noël Riley Fitch in Paris Café: The Select Crowd (Soft Skull, 2007), which is a wonderful read both about the famous Select café of Montparnasse—in the immediate vicinity of Paris’s other legendary cafés, Le Dôme, La Coupole, and La Rotonde—and about the role of cafés in French life. “They have been called the salons of democracy because we are all free to choose our own café. Once you have cast your lot with a particular café, you in a sense ‘own’ the café (and it owns you!). Loyalty binds. ‘It is easier to change one’s mind,’ as one wag said, ‘than it is to change one’s café.’ ” Fitch and the illustrator of the book, Rick Tulka, are so fond of Le Select because it remains the least changed and has retained its authenticity by not becoming a restaurant and not catering to tour buses. All reasons, they believe (and I agree), that Le Select is not often frequented by tourists.
The Paris Café Cookbook: Rendezvous and Recipes from 50 Best Cafés (William Morrow, 1998) and The Bistros, Brasseries, and Wine Bars of Paris: Everyday Recipes from the Real Paris (William Morrow, 2006), both by Daniel Young, are two books I really like, along with Young’s more recent Coffee Love: 50 Ways to Drink Your Java (Wiley, 2009), a photo- and fact-filled little book with fifty recipes for a wide variety of coffee drinks worldwide. Young is no stranger to the culinary world—he’s also the author of Made in Marseille: Food and Flavors from France’s Mediterranean Seaport (William Morrow, 2002) and he served as food critic and columnist for the New York Daily News from 1985 to 1996. He also maintains a great Web site, Young & Foodish (youngandfoodish.com). Young obviously really knows his cafés, both the kind you drink and the kind you frequent. I highly recommend readers note Young’s list of “Café Do’s and Don’t’s” in The Paris Café Cookbook, a few of which are: “Don’t assume a café that carries pain Poilâne has good food. Do ask for pain Poilâne when you order a croque-monsieur” (though note that you will pay a premium for it); “Don’t plan a café lunch for noon. Do plan a lunch at a popular café for 12:55” (despite Mark Greenside’s observation on this page, one o’clock is a popular time for lunch, and the best way to snag a table among locals is to show up just before office workers fill up the best cafés); and “Don’t order a café au lait at any Parisian café, brasserie, bistro, or tabac. Do order a café crème or, better yet, a petit crème” (at some point in the early nineties, café au lait became café crème, and if you order a café au lait you will immediately be identified as a tourist who is about thirty years behind the times).
To Young’s guide to Parisian café decorum, I would add the following reminders: waiters command respect in France, even at cafés, and men and women typically have serving jobs as a profession. Consult the menu posted outside the café before you sit down; Parisians usually know what they want before they take a seat. Cafés (and many restaurants) may have three seating areas, each commanding a different price: at the bar (or au comptoir), where there might be seats but customers usually stand (least expensive); indoor tables (more expensive than the bar); and outside tables, known as à la terrasse (most expensive). If you see tables set with napkins and silverware, don’t sit at one unless you plan on eating a meal. Don’t expect service rapide; allow at least thirty to forty-five minutes to place your order, eat or drink, and pay. If you’re really in a hurry, stand at the bar, where it will be faster and cheaper. If your waiter asks you to pay the bill before you’ve finished, it’s because he or she is going off duty and is required to settle the bill first. Finally, don’t complain about the price of your thimble-sized cup of espresso. You’re in Paris, after all, and you’re paying for the pleasant privilege of obtaining a seat at a table where you can linger—even if your tiny cup is long depleted—for hours.
Though cafés may no longer hold quite the central place in the lives of the French as they once did—according to Harriet Welty Rochefort in an article she wrote for France Today, the number of cafés in France has fallen from two hundred thousand in 1960 to little more than forty thousand today—they are by no means out of fashion. If you frequent the same café on a string of mornings, you may find, as I have, that you see the same people in it, usually sitting in the same spots. As André Aciman notes in Entréz: Signs of France, “Cozy, snug, warm, and secure, a café is not only a second home in a country where homes are always too small, or where being alone is unthinkable; it is a place where one draws closer to others. In La Bohème, everyone would sooner go to a cabaret than stay at home, for one is more comfortable out than in.”
